Self-awareness Essay Example

Self-awareness Essay Self awareness is central to professional social care practice. Therefore, the paper aims at defining main benefits of self-awareness and discussing it s main applications. Awareness is a state which emanates from the divine part within us. It is the perception of the now, of the present moment in all of its reality. In a state of awareness, people are not necessarily thinking we are just being there, doing what we are doing, walking, working, talking etc. Experiencing and perceiving everything with clarity and objectivity.   When we are aware we are simply in the moment, using all our senses, perceiving everything that is around us and within us. Time seems to stand still. We start to experience happiness and awaken our true intelligence because we feed our divine aspect, our consciousness, that which we generally completely neglect. (Abraham 1999)The key to freedom from the human condition is the unique capacity of the human brain to be aware of its own functioning. Human beings are thus capable of being aware of both what they are thinking and what they are feeling – feelings being the emotional-mental interpretation of the instinctual passions in operation. This ability is commonly known as self-awareness. (It All Begins With Awareness 2005)Awareness is the first step in the creation process. As people grow in self awareness, they will better understand why they feel what they feel and why they behave so. That understanding then gives everybody the opportunity and freedom to change those things they’d like to change about themselves and create the life they want. It means, that without fully knowing who you are, self acceptance and change become impossible. (It All Begins With Awareness 2005)Having clarity about who the people are and what they want (and why they want it), empowers them to consciously and actively make those wants a reality. Otherwise, they’ll continue to get â€Å"caught up† in their own internal dramas and u nknown beliefs, allowing unknown thought processes to determine their feelings and actions. (It All Begins With Awareness 2005)If we think about it, not understanding why we do what we do, and feel what we feel is like going through our life with a strangers mind. Its a difficult and chaotic way to live never knowing what this stranger is going to do next.Human beings are complex and diverse. To become more self-aware, we should develop an understanding of ourselves in many areas. Key areas for self-awareness include our personality traits, personal values, habits, emotions, and the psychological needs that drive our behaviors. (Abraham 1999)We dont normally change our personalities, values and needs based on what we learn about ourselves. But, an understanding of our personalities can help us find situations in which we will thrive, and help us avoid situations in which we will experience too much stress. For instance, if a person is highly introverted, he is likely to experience m ore stress in a sales position than a highly extroverted person would. So, if a person is highly introverted, it is better for him either to learn skills to cope with the demands of a sales position that requires extravert-type behaviour patterns, or he should find a position that is more compatible with his personality. Awareness of the personality helps people analyze such a decision. (Abraham 1999)Its important that people know and focus on their personal values.   For instance, if a person’s first priority is being there for his children or his relationship with God, its very easy to lose sight of those priorities on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis. During the workday, so many problems and opportunities arise that the lists of things to do can easily exceed the time people have to do them. Since few of those things pertain to what a person values most, its easy to spend too much time on lower priority activities. When people focus on their values, they are more lik ely to accomplish what they consider most important. (It All Begins With Awareness 2005)The habits are the behaviors that people repeat routinely and often automatically. Although they would like to possess the habits that help them interact effectively with and manage others, they can probably all identify at least one of their habits that decreases their effectiveness. For example, if a person is a manager who never consults his staff before making decisions, that habit may interfere with his ability to build his staff members commitment to the decisions and their decision-making skills as well. (It All Begins With Awareness 2005)Maslow and other scholars have identified a variety of psychological needs that drive the behavior such as needs for esteem, affection, belongingness, achievement, self-actualization, power and control. One of the advantages of knowing which needs exert the strongest influence on our own behaviors is the ability to understand how they affect our interpers onal relationships. (Self-Awareness 2006)Emotional self-awareness has become a hot topic of discussion recently because its one of the five facets of emotional intelligence. Understanding your own feelings, what causes them, and how they impact your thoughts and actions is emotional self-awareness. If somebody was once excited about his job but not excited now, can he get excited again? To answer that question, it helps to understand the internal processes associated with getting excited. A person with high emotional self-awareness understands the internal process associated with emotional experiences and, therefore, has greater control over them. (It All Begins With Awareness 2005)Self-awareness is possible in human beings in that we have the ability to develop and cultivate an awareness of both the social conditioning of beliefs, morals and ethics one has been instilled with since birth and the feelings and emotions that result from the chemical surges of the instinctual passionsà ‚  Ã‚   in operation. What one is ultimately attempting to do is to achieve a pure ‘self’-less state   and this involves observing, investigating and eliminating ‘who’ one thinks one is and ‘who’ one feels   oneself to be – a radical procedure, to say the least. This particular aspect of awareness is not a natural phenomenon and needs to be actively cultivated and persistently practiced in order to ensure success. (It All Begins With Awareness 2005)As such, one needs to proceed with a bloody-minded persistence the likes of which one has not mustered before. To do so, one needs firstly to establish a simple, unswerving and primary aim in life – a pure intent to become happy and harmless, as one was in a pure consciousness experience, for 24 hrs. a day, every day. The method of becoming happy and harmless, 24 ours a day, every day, is both devastatingly simple and ruthlessly efficient. One needs to continually ask oneself the qu estion: How am I experiencing this moment of being alive? The continuous asking of this question is the key to cultivating and developing ‘self’-awareness but it does require persistence and perseverance in order to ensure success †¦(Abraham 1999)The essential method is to undertake a total investigation into anything that is preventing one from being happy and harmless now – after all, if one’s aim is to be happy then one needs to be happy now, not at some time in the future, nor some time in the past. (Self-Awareness 2006)There are a lot of reasons for the awareness. We activate the divine part within us, our consciousness; this provides the basis for spiritual and psychic growth and development. Latent faculties within such as clairvoyance, telepathy, intuition, etc, have a chance to be activated. True intelligence is awakened. We conserve our energy. Directing the awareness within at the same time as we perceive the external world, we can observe thoughts, emotions and feelings; this enables us to achieve self-knowledge and to change. We can practice self-observation without being quickly re-absorbed into the mind. We can be in the correct inner state for any event or situation that we go through. Our sense of awareness gives us a connection with other people with the world. If we feel that connection with the environment then we would not pollute it. If we all had that union with other people we would not start fights or wars. Anyone who is seeking a more spiritual life needs to become more aware. (It All Begins With Awareness 2005)There are even some quotes of self-awareness. Here are some of them.â€Å"Anyone will be unhappy until he recognizes his true calling.†Ã¢â‚¬Å"Be harsh with yourself at times.† (Seneca)â€Å"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.† (Carl Jung)â€Å"Humility is to make a right estimate of oneself.† (Harry Truman)It is first suggested that two social mechanisms leading to self-awareness could be reproduced by self-talk: engaging in dialogues with ourselves, in which we talk to fictive persons, would permit an internalization of others perspectives; and addressing comments to ourselves about ourselves, as others do toward us, would allow an acquisition of self-information. Secondly, it is proposed that self-observation (self-awareness) is possible only if there exists a distance between the individual and any potentially observable self-aspect; self-talk, because it conveys self-information under a different form (i.e., words), would create a redundancy and with it, a wedge within the self. (Self-Awareness 2006)Self-awareness is very important. All kinds of scientific research have been done on this subject. Studies of self-awareness may provide unique insights into consciousness and doctors hope eventually to use such information to help people with disorders that include a lack of awareness of self and others, such as schizophrenia, autism and depersonalization syndrome. (Self-Awareness 2006)